Do you know your customer?

Many product companies make product decisions with a flawed understanding of what’s
important to their customers. Focus groups, customer advisory boards, and one-on-one
conversations all provide data points to determine customer wants and needs. But
these approaches make broad assumptions about your users based upon a limited set
of anecdotal evidence.

OpenMind enables you to build an online community with your customers
and partners, allowing you to:

Find out what features and improvements your customers as a whole would value most

Engage in an online discussion with your users to gain deeper insights into their needs

Communicate upcoming releases, closing the loop on customer feedback – your customers
can see exactly which suggestions became committed features of a future release based
upon community feedback

Allow customers to engage in online discussion with each other and with you via
online forums

OpenMind uses a unique allocation-based point voting system that
creates an environment in which customers will make the same type of trade-off decisions
that you do. It’s not enough to know whether a feature request is a good idea or
not – you need to know which ideas your customers value most.

Product managers make difficult decisions every day – part of their job is to assess
trade-offs in order to determine what subset of possible features and improvements
to address in a particular release based upon a limited number of resources. For example, the
product manager must himself or herself the question: “If I have ten items on a
list of possible features for a release and I can only do six of them, which six would
provide the most value to my customers?”

OpenMind’s allocations create an environment in which your customers
make the same tradeoffs that you do. If I can only vote a limited number of times,
I will choose wisely where to spend my votes rather than indicating every possible
idea that sounds interesting to me.

OpenMind is in use today by these companies:

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